It’s Not Easy Being A Sociopath

Title: Ripley

Rating: 5 Stars

Considering the fact that I’ve read the book (I wrote about it here) and have seen the film (written about here), it’s probably no surprise that I watched the Netflix series Ripley. Considering that I gave five stars to both the novel and the film, I was suspicious that I’d equally enjoy the series. However, I loved it.

It’s interesting how the main plot points are hit in all three versions but, despite that, they ended up hitting me differently.

The story is the same. Tom Ripley, in New York, is bribed to go to Italy by Dickie Greenleaf’s father to bring Dickie home so that he can take his place at the head of the family manufacturing firm. Ripley goes to Italy, and, after some awkwardness, manages to befriend Dickie. Dickie’s girlfriend Marge is much more suspicious of Tom. Tom grows to love the life of being a wealthy American in Italy. Eventually, Dickie tires of Tom and tells Tom that he’s going to go away. Unwilling to give up the lifestyle, Tom murders Dickie. He impersonates Dickie so that he can draw from Dickie’s trust fund. Dickie’s friend Freddie is also suspicious of Tom and tells him that he’s going to bring in authorities to investigate. That’s the end of Freddie. As all of this is going on, Tom is having to switch between the Tom and Dickie identities while the police, Tom’s father, and Marge are all beginning to zero in on him. Will Tom get away with it?

The cinematic style of the series is breathtaking. The series is entirely filmed in black and white. It’s kind of weird to describe it in this way, but it’s a rich, luscious black and white. The cinematography feels crisper and cleaner than if filmed in color. It’s truly a beautiful series.

Not only the film but Italy is shown in all of its splendor. The characters stay in ancient villas with amazing views. The streets that they walk on have an ineffable charm. Stunning works of art are on view everywhere. Everything is steeped in ruined grandeur. Especially when you think of the one room desolate hotel room that Tom was staying while in New York, you can understand why Tom, once exposed to the beauty of Italy, would never want to go back.

Tom Ripley is played by Andrew Scott. He’s probably previously best known as the hot priest in Fleabag. Here is something totally different. In the film, Matt Damon played Ripley. As I wrote in my review, in the film Ripley is a sociopath but Damon played him with vulnerability. He’s in over his head but desperately wants to maintain the lifestyle. He almost reluctantly has to murder.

Scott’s version is a straight out sociopath. He plays Ripley with oddly cold, dead eyes. You can understand why Marge is immediately repelled by him. He’s a tough grifter who’s stumbled upon a huge opportunity and will do anything to capitalize on it. As an experienced grifter, he is constantly on the alert. He eyes everyone with suspicion, coldly calculating what they know, what they want, and what that means to him. There is no milk of human kindness in his veins.

I’ve mentioned this in my previous posts, but to an even larger extent in this series, the rich are clueless and talentless. In the film, Dickie and Marge are played by Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. They are both at their movie star glamorous peaks. This is especially true of Law, who is positively gorgeous in his role.

In the series, the two are played by Johnny Flynn and Dakota Fanning. Don’t get me wrong, these are both attractive people (after all Johnny Flynn was the romantic lead in both Emma. and Vanity Fair). Still, they don’t have the glow of Law and Paltrow. In the series, Dickie and Marge are basically above average people that are living this lavish lifestyle just because they are the children of wealth. Dickie is in Italy to study to be a painter but his pictures are laughably bad. Marge is writing a book that is simply pictures and text about the town that they are staying in.

Their friend Freddie is played by Eliot Sumner. In the film, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Freddie is a large, brash, typically loud American. In the series, Freddie is much more subtle but still is contemptuous of Tom. Even though he’s suspicious, Freddie, like Dickie and Marge, can’t fathom that Tom would actually be dangerous. Tom is not someone that you want to turn your back on.

Interesting, in the series, grifters can recognize other grifters. In the small town, a local mafioso seemingly randomly follows Tom and within a short while, the two become allies and establish a business relationship. Similarly, at a stuffy, sterile cocktail party in Venice for the vapid rich, a man named Reeves Minot (wonderfully played by John Malkovich) instantly makes a connection with Tom and Tom later gets a fake passport from him. It’s almost as if there’s an essence or maybe an invisible musk that attracts such people to each other.

Since this is a series, it allowed time for characters to incrementally develop. For instance, Tom clearly at the outset knows nothing about culture and seems disinclined to learn. When Dickie takes him to see a painting by Caravaggio, Tom is transformed. He develops a strong interest in art, especially in Caravaggio. At one point, we see that Tom has taken up painting and it’s clear that even at this early point that his painting is far superior to Dickie’s work.

It’s not random that Tom is obsessed with Caravaggio. For those that do not know, Caravaggio led a wild life. He killed a man and had to flee Rome with a death sentence on his head. His mental health was always in question and he died under mysterious circumstances. His paintings, alive with light, often are brutal depictions of violence. If there’s such a thing as a painter for sociopaths, Caravaggio might fit the bill.

I have a couple of additional random notes. One is that stairs feature prominently throughout the series. Tom is consistently seen going up stairs. One of the rare times that we see Tom go down is when he has to hide in squalid quarters to escape. The stairs are a metaphor for Tom’s goal to always be ascending.

Another interesting item that I noticed is how hard it is to be a sociopath. It’s a lot of hard work, whether it’s dragging Freddie’s dead body down a flight of stairs or having to clean up the mess of murders. There are times when you see Tom just sigh and grunt with the frustration of the never ending work of it all. It struck me as amusing.

So, I’ve loved the novel, the film, and now the series. I can hardly wait until the opera comes out!

The Thinking Man’s QAnon

Title: American Conspiracy – The Octopus Murders

Rating: 4 Stars

By now, I’m sure that everyone knows about QAnon. Unless you’ve fallen completely into the conspiracy vortex, it’s pretty clear that, on the spectrum of conspiracy theories, it’s deep on the batshit crazy end. The fact that it spawned from Pizzagate, the theory that there’s a cabal (theorists love to use the word cabal) of high level Democrats who regularly meet in the basement of a pizza parlor to engage in Satanic, cannibalistic, sex abuse of minors, shows you that you’re probably going to be in for a bumpy ride. The saintly Donald Trump is bravely fighting off this group of pedophiles. Let’s not forget that either the assassinated John F Kennedy or his son (dead in a plane crash) was going to reappear in November 2021 (in case you haven’t noticed, that did not happen) to be Trump’s running mate. Trump also did not get reinstated as President as predicted on March 4, 2021, or on March 20, 2021, or even on August 13, 2021.

In short, it’s madness. The fact that, fairly recently, some twenty-five percent of all Republicans believe it is astounding.

I do have a confession to make. Decades ago, when in my mid twenties, it would be fair to say that conspiracy theories were kind of a guilty pleasure for me. Still a young adult, I probably found the anarchic state of being an adult to be subconsciously unsettling. In some weird way, believing in conspiracy theories gives one some confidence that someone, somewhere, has their hand on the till of reality and is driving it. Even if that person was evil, that would at least imply that there’s some order and control in the world.

Decades older, I understand the foolishness of that. The world is anarchy. There is no meaning. We’re on a infinitesimally small rock floating in the middle of an incomprehensibly large universe, which if some theories holds true, is itself nothing more than one of an even more incomprehensibly large number of multiverses. That’s just how it is. Deal with it.

Be that as it may, in the 1980s and 1990s, I strolled around in the murky world of conspiracy theories. The granddaddy of them all is, of course, the JFK assassination. There are so many more. A certainly not exhaustive list would include: RFK assassination, MLK Jr assassination, New World Order, George Soros, reptilian humanoids, Paul McCartney (he’s dead, you know), Area 51, and fluoridating water as a communist plot. More recent ones include 9/11, Obama’s birth, and all of the people that the Clintons have killed (I believe it’s over forty now).

Yes, most of these are certifiable. However, that does not change the fact that some of the more outlandish theories actually turned out to be true. The classic example is Iran-Contra. It truly is too byzantine to go into here, but if you’re interested I did write about it here. It might be the weirdest theory of them all but a significant chunk of it proved to be true. The same can be said about Watergate, which I wrote about here. OK, maybe I haven’t -completely- gotten over my conspiracy theory phase. 🙂

That brings me to Danny Casolaro. I first encountered him when I was lost on a path in a gloomy wood (semi-obscure Inferno reference for you literary geeks). Casolaro was a charismatic, dashingly handsome man that believed that he stumbled upon the true mother of all conspiracy theories. He was down in Virginia to nail down the last confirmation. Instead he was found in a hotel bathtub dead with multiple slash wounds on his wrists.

The body was quickly embalmed without informing his family and the coroner verdict was suicide. This rush to judgment and closure has caused many to be suspicious of the official line. That, and he was apparently getting phone death threats and had recently told his brother that, if he died in an accident, that it was not an accident.

And away we go.

Many people have tried to pick up Danny’s somewhat cluttered and haphazard breadcrumbs of clues and tried to find the truth themselves. Thus we find ourselves trailing along, in a four part documentary, a researcher named Christian Hansen as he completely immerses himself in Casolaro’s documentation (of which there are boxes and boxes) to see if he can get to the bottom of it.

What, exactly, is this Octopus that Casolaro keeps mentioning? Well, it’s very complicated. I’d call it a mega conspiracy as it stitches together a disparate set of theories into an integrated whole.

It all starts with something called Inslaw. It’s a software company that created a groundbreaking application called Promis. Remember that this is the 1980s. As a software guy, it appears that the groundbreaking application was a relational database. Be that as it may, it proved to be quite lucrative. That is, until the Justice Department arbitrarily confiscated it from Inslaw and gave it to someone else.

Why, you ask? Well, as compensation to a man that apparently paid out forty million dollars to Iranians to make sure that the US hostages would not get released before the 1980 election (to prevent the so-called October Surprise; the Reagan campaign calculated that the only way that Carter could win the election is by negotiating the hostages’ release).

From here connections are made to the tiny Cabazon Native American reservation. There, a John Nichols was working with the tribe to set up a gambling casino and, oh yeah, setting up a shadow defense company to make artillery shells there.

Of course, it probably goes without saying that Casolaro manages to connect all of this up with both the Iran-Contra and the BCCI banking scandals.

As in all good conspiracy theories, there are unsolved brutal murders. One person claimed to have discovered evidence of fraud. He, along with his friends, were shot execution style. Of course, all evidence was nowhere to be found. Another victim was hog tied with wire and allowed to slowly choke to death.

There are two main people whispering secrets into ears. One is Michael Riconosciuto. A self professed child genius (although the filmmakers uncovered a childhood IQ test score of a simply above average 124), he has spent decades in prison for various drug offenses. The other is Robert Nichols (no relation to John Nichols), who presents himself as a deadly dangerous intelligence officer. It seems pretty clear to me that both men were spinning Casolaro in circles, possibly just for their own amusement.

One thing that I did find amusing is that Casolaro believed that President George HW Bush was in the middle of it. Bush is the Forrest Gump of conspiracies. He pops up at the weirdest times. It’s probably not that surprising when you realize that Bush was a CIA Director in the 1970s, was Ronald Reagan’s Vice President in the 1980s (where he allegedly had a role in, yes, Iran-Contra), and then served a term as President. I’ve read about some people that have even tried to place him somehow into the JFK assassination.

There’s so much more. What is the truth? After four episodes, probably unsurprising, the truth is elusive and unconclusive. On the one hand, one of the ‘highly placed’ intelligence sources turned out to be an Aetna office manager that apparently did her research by asking around at the bowling alley that she played at regularly. On the other hand, some twenty-five years after Casolaro’s death, the reporters unearthed evidence that appears to have been overlooked in the original investigation.

That’s how conspiracies work. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle that is just missing a couple of pieces. In your search for these pieces, you discover that the puzzle is just one corner of an even larger puzzle, so you start working that.

Rinse and repeat.

George Smiley Gone To Seed

Title: Slow Horses

Rating: 5 Stars

Usually I compare novels to films. Since the third season of Slow Horses on Apple TV has been getting such rave reviews, I decided to see what the fuss is. I’ve started and have just completed the first season. That season corresponds to Mick Herron’s novel Slow Horses.

The setting is the secret service MI5 in London. The center of MI5’s activity is located at Regent’s Park. It is a sleek ultra modern building that is constantly abuzz with activity for the purpose of keeping England safe from all attacks.

And then there’s Slough House. Located further away, in an unfashionable part of London, it is a dank, decrepit structure with a faulty door. The people that work here are still MI5, but just barely. Everyone that works at Slough House has failed the MI5 in some way. One person failed a training evaluation. Another left top secret material on public transit. One person is so obnoxious that no one wants to work with him.

In all cases, these washouts have been sent to Slough House. There they work mundane, monotonous, brain dead tasks until they are finally driven to quit in desperation. As a play on the house name, the people that work there are called Slow Horses.

The biggest washout of them all is their head, Jackson Lamb. Once a renowned, battle tested field agent, now he slovenly lounges in his office, smoking, drinking, belching, and farting. He is bitter and caustic to everyone.

This is the place that careers go to die. That is until a young Muslim man is kidnapped by a British white nationalist organization that threatens to behead him in a matter of hours. Considering the fact that the young man in question is the nephew of a high ranking member of the Pakistani intelligence service, this has the makings of a major international incident.

All of this would be far from the normal remit of the Slow Horses, but it appears that someone at the bright shining headquarters of MI5 has it in for Slough House and is setting them up to be the patsies when it all apparently starts going South.

It is up to Jackson Lamb and his island of misfit toys to save themselves from the frame up and, along the way, to save the young man from execution.

Usually, I end these blogs with a comparison between the two content forms. Here, it’s a bit strange because there is very little daylight between the novel and the series. I watched the series first and then read the novel. The novel came very close to serving as the screenplay for the series. The ending is a bit different in the series in that the Slow Horses have a bit more of a heroic role to play, but considering the medium, this choice makes sense as a more visually appealing option.

Even though not really the protagonist, Jackson Lamb is what makes the novel so outstanding. An apparently drunk washout, when he senses danger afoot, his highly honed instincts, experience, and training come into play and he becomes a masterful strategist. Even though never giving up his boorish manner, he effortlessly outwits the fancy suits that look upon him with ill disguised contempt.

In the series, Gary Oldman brilliantly plays Lamb. Now late in his career, Oldman is at the point where he simply embodies characters such as these. Reading the novel, it’s tough to envision any other actor doing as well as Oldman. The series is outstanding on other merits, but simply watching Oldman’s performance is worth it just on its own.

Slow Horses is as far from the sleek James Bond as you can get. In fact, this is pretty far from the much more realistic John le Carré’s George Smiley novels. I found it interesting that Gary Oldman actually played Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Although certainly not flashy, Smiley is also not slovenly like Lamb. Smiley is almost unfailingly polite whereas I can’t remember a single instance where Lamb isn’t overtly rude. Oldman was outstanding in both roles.

There was an article in The Atlantic a bit ago that theorized that Slow Horses is a manifestation of the decline of England. Once England held the world enthralled. Its intelligence gathering operation was considered to be absolutely world class.

Those days are long past it. They are now consciously exiting continental treaties for nationalist reasons that result in nothing more than self-inflicted pain. Their PM’s are a joke, whether it be the actual buffoon Boris Johnson or the cartoonishly incompetent Liz Truss or the hapless milquetoast Rishi Sunak. Reading the decline from the sophisticated suaveness of Ian Fleming to the clear eyed realism of John le Carré to the decrepit collapse of Mick Herron, England is in a spiral from which escape seems impossible.

Reading / watching Slow Horses gives you front seats to the unfolding spectacle. Bring out the popcorn!

Communist Propaganda From A Trillion Dollar Corporation

Title: I’m A Virgo

Rating: 5 Stars

I’m just going to go ahead and say it. Boots Riley is the wild, creative genius that we need right now. I first encountered Riley when I watched the brilliant, insane Sorry To Bother You (written about here) back in 2018. He’s now back with I’m A Virgo.

Cootie is a nineteen year old Black man living in Oakland (also the setting for Sorry To Bother You). He was raised by his aunt and uncle. They are extremely protective of him. In fact, they have never let him out into public. Why, you ask? Well, the fact that he’s thirteen feet tall probably has something to do with it. Growing up so sheltered, he has, to say the least, an innocently naïve view of the world informed, to a large extent, by an obsession with a comic book series featuring an Ironman type superhero simply known as The Hero.

Unsurprisingly, they can’t keep him secret forever, especially since he’s reached the age where he’s eager to go out into the world. He is discovered by two young men and a young woman. Amazed by his size, they effectively take him under their wing and usher him into their world.

As to be expected, he becomes quite the viral sensation (becoming known as Twamp Thing). As he becomes more known, he meets and falls for a young woman who has the superpower of unbelievable speed.

All along there are strange periodic power failures. We find out that the power failures are actually intentional to keep the poor people weak and subjugated. One of Cootie’s friends, the young woman Jones, is a truly charismatic speaker attempting a general strike against the power company in protest of the outages. The Hero, actually a real life person, heroically intervenes but only to defend the property rights of the ownership class. Cootie, horrified with the actions of his real life idol, decides to take on the role of the supervillain to battle the power company. The Hero, Cootie, and Jones are all on a collision course that culminates in the final episode.

The main thing that I love is how unpredictable the series unfolds. Even with its wild strangeness, the story is not chaotic. There is a structure and order to it. Much like in Sorry to Bother You, Riley clearly has purpose and vision and is executing it to perfection. It’s a wonderful marriage of message and entertainment.

There’s so many themes going on here. You see how a sweet, naïve, lovable young Black man is turned into a literal caged monster because of the systemic racism that sees all large Black men as dangerous.

The Hero, representing law and order, is wearing white and saying all of the right things. However, it’s clear though that he is only interested in enforcing the law and order that reinforces the existing economic order. His justice is a false justice. His comic book series is nothing more than propaganda to prop up that false injustice.

Entire groups of people are treated as barely citizens. You have the people of the Lower Bottoms, who collectively have been shrunk down to six inches in height. They are truly a lower (smaller) class of people that have to fight to be even recognized.

You see Cootie almost immediately start being taken advantage of. His agent, of course a white man, leaps into action when he first sees Cootie and has him posing uncomfortably for hours on end in absurd settings just for a little bit of money. Cootie is just another advertising product to be exploited.

Although the series builds towards a standoff between The Hero and Cootie, the true hero is Jones. With her spellbinding ability to make abstract concepts visually compelling and doing the hard work of organizing a general strike, it becomes apparent that if real change does eventually come about, it will be because of the actions of people like Jones. There is no shortcut. There is no final battle between good and evil. Progress must be worked for and fought for.

I’ve just talked about the ideas. The presentation of the series is amazing. I haven’t read about it, but I’m guessing that the impressive visuals of presenting a thirteen foot tall man in a conventional world is some combination of perspective, very creative use of props, and CGI. I found Cootie’s attempts to fit into a world much too small for him quite convincing.

As a filmmaker, Riley is clever. One scene, when Cootie is confined, seemed reminiscent of King Kong, once again making a commentary about a racist society equating a Black man to an animal. At one point, there’s a thread of a plot involving a video that is so compulsively enjoyable that no one can tear themselves from it. Intentional or not, that is a direct call to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

One final note is about the blog title. Without going too much into it, the series ends with a several minute stirring and compelling denunciation of capitalism. I found it to be absolutely brilliant.

Riley is a communist activist. Sorry to Bother You also had a strong anti-capitalist bent. I found it extremely amusing that I’m A Virgo is an Amazon Prime presentation. After all, Amazon is (at least as of this writing) a trillion dollar corporation. Even among its highly compensated office workers, it has a reputation for high stressful working conditions that regularly leave employees in tears. Amazon warehouse workers have industrial accidents at significant higher rates than average and are driven by automated systems to work so hard that they sometimes feel the need to urinate in bottles. Amazon delivery drivers, who aren’t even considered Amazon employers, have to deliver packages at a punishing rate (again having to urinate in bottles) in substandard vehicles with safety issues. It’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has, over the years, come to bear an uncanny resemblance to Dr Evil.

What does it mean that Amazon greenlit a project with such an anti-capitalist message? Are they so secure in the power that they wield and their hold over society that they see Riley’s message as absolutely no threat to their sprawling empire? Or is there some rebel faction in the bowels of Amazon that saw this as an opportunity to shoot off a flare of desperate rebellion?

Or do they understand that even communists have money and as part of their grand plan to own all of the capital in the world, are they now going after communist money?

Truman Show Jury Duty

Title: Jury Duty

Rating: 5 Stars

An ad is placed on Craigslist. A documentary crew wants to follow someone around while they’re performing jury duty. The purpose is to get an inside look at the actual details of performing your civic duty. A number of people apply. Only one, a solar contractor named Ronald Gladden, is selected. The trial that Gladden participates in is a civil trial where an employee is accused of causing extensive damage to his employer’s business while high on drugs or alcohol.

We see Gladden go through the entire process. We see him fill out his juror questionnaire. We see him go through voir dire. We see him get selected for a jury. We see him get picked to be the jury foreperson. We see the opening statements, the evidence presented, and the closing statements. We watch as he leads his fellow jurors in deliberation. Once they come to a consensus, he reads the verdict in the courtroom.

Along the way, Gladden sees some weird shit. First of all, at best B list actor James Marsden (known for roles in the X-Men series of films as well as The Notebook), is a jury alternate and it turns out, kind of an asshole. We meet his fellow jurors, including the techno nerd Todd, the slow talking but very earnest Ken, the virginally innocent Noah who discovers that his girlfriend is cheating on him during the trial, and the vixen Jeannie, who leaps at the chance to seduce the now disconsolate Noah. Gladden sees Marsden hire paparazzi to invade the courtroom in a bid to get out of jury duty but instead results in the jury getting sequestered over the course of the trial, which lasts for an astounding seventeen days. Gladden also sees some comically incompetent lawyering on behalf of the defendant.

What Gladden doesn’t know (but we know) is that it’s all a sham. There is no jury. There is no trial. They are all actors. The judge is an actor. His fellow jurors are actors. Both the plaintiff and the defendant and their lawyers are actors. Gladden is the only person not in on the joke.

In the final episode, when Gladden is told, all of the layers are exposed that made this deception possible. There is basically a control room devoted to watching Gladden (in case you haven’t already, you now get the Truman Show reference in the blog title). There are hidden cameras everywhere. On the dinner out, the entire Margaritaville restaurant was closed and taken over for the show. Similarly, at one point the Huntington Beach District Court was shut down, ostensibly for COVID reasons, to prepare for the show.

The main thing that comes out of it is the sweet nature of Gladden. No matter what happens, he treats everyone graciously and respectfully. Even when told that the trial is a sham, he just looks astounded and laughs. Of course, the $100,000 that he’s given for being the ‘hero’ of the show probably helped mitigate whatever feelings of betrayal he might have had.

The execution of this astounds me. For seventeen days, an entire rehearsed show was performed. For seventeen days, no one could break character. If Gladden figured it out on day fifteen, all would have been lost. Behind the scenes, you see that the producers have entire flow charts of possibilities that they might have to execute, depending upon the choices that Gladden makes. There’s a whole scene where Noah claims to be a racist in a very misguided attempt to get out of jury duty. This could only work if Gladden remembered and mentioned an old South Park episode. There was a factory visit (the so-called scene of the incident) where it was important for the later jury deliberation that Gladden go upstairs to an office. They had to contrive a seemingly natural way for him to choose to go up. They were seemingly prepared for nearly every contingency.

In many ways, this reminded me of the very strange yet very funny Nathan Fielder series, The Rehearsal (I wrote about it here). Like The Rehearsal, it exists in this strange nexus of reality television and scripted drama. As you get deeper into the series, you begin to wonder what really is real and what is scripted. Did Gladden really have no inkling what is going on? Is he really in on it and the joke is on us? When everyone is involved in the deception, who can we trust?

James Marsden is outstanding. He perfectly plays the spoiled, self centered, fragile actor. Not only does his antics cause the jury to be sequestered, but when he clogs Gladden’s toilet after taking a massive dump in it, he coerces Gladden to accept the blame for it because otherwise TMZ might hear about it and report this Marsden toilet clogging scandal. Marsden reminds me of Nicholas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Immense Talent (written about here). It must be challenging to play a subtly different version of yourself. In Marsden’s case, he needed to do it for seventeen days without breaking.

Now having watched it, I now wonder if Gladden is going to spend the rest of his life experiencing Main Character Syndrome. For seventeen days, unknowingly, he was the lead in a fictional story of his life.

The End Of The Golden Age Of Streaming?

This is kind of a weird week. This week marks the end of not one, not two, not three, but four series that all are considered prestige streaming series. I’m talking about Succession, Barry, Ted Lasso, and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel.

This seems like a moment. Just a short couple of years ago, the streaming services were on a rampage creating content. Thinking that the more content it generated would bring that many more eyeballs to their service, a virtual endless set of projects were greenlit. It seemed like any writer would eventually become a show runner for their own show. The various streamers were just throwing money around. In particular, Ted Sarandos, for many years the Chief Content Officer of Netflix, seemed to have a virtually unlimited budget.

Things seem to be changing. Perhaps reality is starting to set in. The streaming services are showing a bit more self control in greenlighting projects. Even more bizarrely, services are choosing to cancel already created content before even releasing it to the public (I’m looking at you Max). Some series that have been released are being pulled out of circulation. Apparently, the services are willing to eat the sunk cost of this content to keep from paying residuals to the artists involved in the production.

So, in case we are at a pivotal moment, I thought that I’d say just a few words about the four important series that just concluded. I’ll discuss each one in ascending order of my own personal ranking of the series.

The Marvelous Mrs Maisel: Wrapping up its fifth season, I really enjoyed the first season. The series felt like a sip of champagne. The colors were bright and the dialog was sparkling. Taking place in an idealized 1950s New York City, I became immediately invested in the comedy career of Mrs Maisel. Her relationship with her manager Susie, her soon to be ex husband Joel, and her parents were lively and fun. Unfortunately, in the early part of season 2, Mrs Maisel’s parents temporarily move to Paris. This seems to start off a series of unrelated adventures across all of the major characters. It seemed to be following the traditional sitcom pattern of forcibly putting its key characters into weird situations as opposed to just letting them organically grow. By the time the fourth season rolled around, I’d started losing interest and was watching just because I was previously invested. The last season was a semi-random series of time jumps over a thirty year period or so. Of the four series, this was the one that I was happiest to see end.

Barry: Lasting four seasons, this was another series where I most enjoyed the earlier seasons. The idea of a hitman, very good at his job but at a point in his life where it felt that his soul was dead and then having it reawaken upon stumbling into an acting class, was a great concept. It did a fantastic job of creating a protagonist that you cared for even though he was, deep down, a monster. The tension of Barry trying to rediscover his humanity through the medium of acting while also constantly being put into situations of having to kill people was interesting and actually quite funny. It was necessarily a very dark comedy but, by the third season, it became way more dark than comedic. By the end of the fourth season, in my opinion, it’d lost the balance between darkness and humor at the expense of humor. Not to spoil, but unquestionably it had to end the way that it did, but again, like Mrs Maisel, watching it felt almost like a chore. In the final episode, it did redeem its black humor when we watch Barry’s son watch a hilariously fictionalized version of Barry’s life as portrayed through some schlocky adaptation.

Ted Lasso: Lasting three seasons, I think it’s best to understand the motivations of its creator, Jason Sudeikis. Ted Lasso was originally a character created for promotional purposes. When Sudeikis was expanding it to a series, it was during the Trump administration. As a counterpoint to the darkness and negativity of that administration, he intentionally made Lasso an inveterate optimistic, positive person. Knowing that is important to understanding the series. Even though the series deals with dark issues (Lasso’s divorce, his father’s suicide), there’s no question that everyone’s going to come out of it on the other side a better person. Everyone (OK, except for the billionaire asshole Rupert, who of course gets his comeuppance) in the huge ensemble cast grows and becomes more positive. Critics are hating on the final season due to the episode length and the schmaltzy closure of most of the main characters. Given the lens that Sudeikis was looking through, I think it’s understandable. There was no way that Nate wasn’t going to end the series as the heel. Lasso was always going to go back to his family. This isn’t Shakespeare here. This is a well made situation comedy bringing all of its characters in for a soft landing. Of all shows that I’ve watched over the last several years, Ted Lasso was the one that most often left me in happy tears. And well done for doing so.

Succession: Lasting four seasons, I’ve already written about it here. This show, even more than Barry, balances perfectly comedy and drama. If anyone has any envy of the very rich, watching this should quell it. These are all not only deeply unhappy people but are emotionally broken. On top of it all, despite their glib quips, they are not very smart. No matter which sibling ended up on top, you just knew that eventually they would end up destroying Logan’s media empire. Logan’s final words to them acknowledged this, accusing them of not being serious people. Logan reached outside of his family to sell off his empire to Lukas Mattson. Mattson initially appeared to thoroughly overmatch the Roy siblings. By the end of the last season, it is clear that Mattson is just another person that confuses glibness with intelligence. The series relentlessly makes the case that our powerful, filthy rich overloads are absolutely cluelessly strutting around with no clothes. This is the late stage capitalism show that our beleaguered timeline needs. I made a similar comment in my Glass Onion article (here), but Succession, along with Glass Onion and Don’t Look Up, needs to be sealed into a time capsule so that future generations, as they struggle to survive the postapocalyptic world that we’ve bestowed upon them, can understand how it happened.

Hopefully I’m wrong about peaking and that the streaming services will continue to build high quality compelling content. Right now, I’m banking on the second season of Severance (on hold pending the writers’ strike, alas).

Martyrdom By The Feds

Title: Waco American Apocalypse

Rating: 4 Stars

For those of us of a certain age, it’s hard to believe that it’s been thirty years since the Waco siege. To commemorate this milestone, Netflix released a three part documentary. The documentary is informative both for those that were too young to remember it as well as for those of us for whom it’s a fading memory. The documentary doesn’t take sides. Surviving Branch Davidians, ATF agents, FBI negotiators, members of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, family members, and journalists were all given a chance to express their points of view.

Taking place in 1993, an argument can be made that the events of Waco was one of the key events that birthed the modern right wing militia movement. You can draw a very straight line from Waco to the Oklahoma City bombing. In fact the Oklahoma City bombing, not coincidentally, took place two years to the day of Waco’s fiery inferno. Shocking to me, there was actually footage of Timothy McVeigh, the OKC bomber, at Waco, selling right wing propaganda bumper stickers. Not so directly, much of the vitriol that the far right throws at the federal government and federal law enforcement officers today can be traced to the actions of Waco and the earlier Ruby Ridge.

If you want to watch an informative documentary on one of the dark, weird events in American history, it is worth your time. Watching it thirty years later allowed me to be able to relive these events with a certain intellectual and emotional detachment.

First things first, let’s get real. Martyr or not, David Koresh was not a good guy. Having taken over the Branch Davidians, he ruled over the members with an absolute cultish authority. He dissolved all marriages. He claimed all women as his own. He had sex with girls as young as thirteen, if not younger. Convinced that he was the messiah and that Mount Carmel was going to be his Golgotha, he amassed an arsenal. He had over a million rounds of ammunition on site. Not only that, he had illegally modified automatic weapons and possessed illegal items such as hand grenades. There is no doubt in my mind that he should have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted of many crimes.

It was the fact that he was buying and selling illegal guns that got the ATF’s attention. They had a plan to rush in, catch the Davidians unawares, make arrests, and secure the area with minimal risk of violence.

Unfortunately, a local postal worker that happened to be a Davidian got wind of this plan and rushed to the compound to warn Koresh and the others. So, you have this heavily armed group led by a self appointed messiah who believes that the federal government is going to come and martyr him and what is he told? He is told that the federal government is about to come after him with full force. He prepares for the final battle by arming and stationing his followers around the compound.

Here’s the thing. The ATF knew that their plan was blown. Their plan relied upon surprise to be successful and they knew that they no longer had it. They should have cancelled the operation and waited for another opportunity. Instead, because of some combination of bureaucratic inertia or some deluded sense of their own superiority, they went ahead. It was a bloodbath. Several ATF agents were killed. Koresh himself was wounded.

This started the siege. Negotiators were brought in to try to bring about a surrender. Some children and some women did leave the compound. There was one key moment when it looked like the deal was done but then Koresh decided that God had told him to hold off. There was another moment where yet another deal was about  to be brokered. More people left but then the militaristic members of the FBI began parading around their armored vehicles, crushing Davidian automobiles, and blaring music and sound at the compound, effectively scuttling any chance at that deal.

At the top level, the FBI could never decide upon a consistent approach. They instead had two completely contradictory paths. One was the hostage negotiators with their slow, patient, empathetic attempts to establish a connection with Koresh and the Davidians. The second approach was the FBI Hostage Response Team (HRT). These were hard guys that would have been content to put a bullet in Koresh’s head and call it a day. Having these two so different simultaneous approaches obviously decreased the possibility of a successful mission.

There is still mystery, to this day, about the last day of the siege. On that morning, armored vehicles ventured into the compound and fired tear gas into the building. The intent was to drive the Davidians out and to force a mass surrender. The armored vehicles tore through the building like it was made of paper. Shortly after that assault, multiple simultaneous fires started spreading throughout the building. Because of the danger of combustible explosives, fire engines were not allowed to the scene. The building burnt to the ground. Very few Davidians escaped.

To this day it’s not clear how the fire was set. A surviving Davidian claims that it was the armored vehicles. However, the fact that multiple fires were started, including one fire that was upwind, casts doubt on that. There was audio tape (I’m not sure how it was procured) in which you can hear Koresh talking about fuel and setting fires. Given that martyrdom was his goal, it would certainly make sense that they would choose mass suicide.

One thing interesting was the interviews of the surviving Davidians thirty years after the fact. Decades later and they still seem to think that not only was Koresh right but that he was also just (and maybe even the Messiah). Listening to one of the members (now a middle aged woman) justify Koresh having sex with a twelve year old girl was kind of shocking. I look at Koresh and I see just another of a long line of narcissistic, apocalyptic people using religion as their vehicle to power. It’s hard for me to fathom still having such faith in a man thirty years after his death.

If I needed to sum up Waco in one sentence, I’d say that Koresh and his followers wanted to die a violent death in the name of God, and the federal government, through missteps and incompetence, gave them the opportunity for it to happen.

A Cold War Assassin Revenge Comedy Buddy Series

Title: Kleo

Rating: 5 Stars

I don’t often write about television series. Usually books, films, and history are my jam. Every now and then, one does catch my fancy. So it goes with Kleo.

First of all, a word of caution. It is a German series, so it is subtitled. Hopefully that won’t scare you off. Jella Hause stars as Kleo. Set in the late years of East Germany, Kleo is an efficient and brutal East German secret police (Stasi) assassin. One night she infiltrates West Germany and successfully kills her assigned target. Once she comes back to East Germany, she finds herself unexpectedly arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. Pregnant, she loses it in a prison fight. Now she has lost everything and it appears that she will wither and die in jail.

Things change when the Berlin Wall falls and, shortly after that, the East German government itself collapses. All political prisoners are released. Kleo, now free, with her ruthless implacable efficiency, seeks to discover who imprisoned her and to exact revenge upon them.

At the same time, there is a West German police officer named Sven (Dimitrij Schaad). He’s a sweet natured, bumbling, low level officer. Having been at the disco where Kleo assassinated her last victim, he becomes obsessed with finding her. In so doing, he loses his job and his wife.

Over time, the paths of Sven and Kleo begin to cross. After almost killing Sven, Kleo decides that the two of them should team up. Sven, once convinced of the larger truth that Kleo is trying to discover, agrees and the final third or so of the series are the two of them working together to understand why Kleo was betrayed by her own government. Ultimately, they stumble upon a top level conspiracy that could blow apart the fragile Cold War peace.

Why do I like it so much? After all, it just seems to be just another grim graphic revenge action series. Make no mistake about it, many people die. Kleo is a one woman wrecking dynamo.  It kind of sounds like Kill Bill or John Wick.

There are two things that put it a cut above the rest. The first is that, surprisingly enough, it’s actually quite funny. Sure, Kleo is a killing machine, but over time she does it all with what can only be described as impish humor. She seems to always be on the verge of a wry smile flickering across her face. Her eyes light up with delight as the adventure continues. Hause brings significant charisma to a role that could have been deadly (if not boringly) serious. Similarly, Sven, with his borderline competence, is also quite funny. A peaceful man, once he teams up with Kleo, he is hilariously appalled by her terminator behavior. The two of them together are a delight to watch.

There are other characters that are also quite fun. There is the West German Thilo (Julius Feldmeier) that somehow ends up living with Kleo. He is determined to start a nightclub featuring techno music so that he can be teleported back home to his home galaxy to save some princesses (yes, you did just read that correctly). There is the East German Uwe (Vincent Redetzki), a dorkish assassin out to get Kleo. Everyone seems to be having fun.

The second reason is about some of the other characters in the series. One of the characters that Kleo must track down and kill is Erich Mielke. The leader of East Germany during this time is Erich Honecker. A character in this series is supposedly his wife (named Margot). Here, Margot is evil in a communist state apparatchik kind of way and has improbably purple hair. For some apparently random reason, much of the series is set in Chile.

Here’s the thing. None of that is random. Mielke was head of the Stasi. Clearly, in real life, he wasn’t murdered by Kleo (he was sentenced to prison but ultimately was released due to ill health and died in a nursing home), but he is a historical figure. Even weirder, Honecker did have a wife named Margot. Margot led the forced adoption of children of dissidents and created prison like conditions for children. So, yes, she was kind of evil in a communist state apparatchik kind of way. Not only that, but Margot was known as the “Purple Witch” due to her purple dyed hair. Finally, when East Germany finally fell, leaders looking for asylum for some reason did seem to flock to Chile.

I did not know any of this. As a history geek, being exposed to this little known (at least to me) side of history was quite interesting. Also, this mixing of reality within a revisionist revenge story is reminiscent of Inglorious Basterds.

For all of these reasons, a series that I came to with very limited expectations hit the ball out of the park.

 

Not A Hero To Be Found Here

Title: Vanity Fair

A little while ago, I stumbled upon the 2018 television series adaptation of Vanity Fair. Inspired by watching that, I re-read Thackeray’s novel, which I hadn’t read in well over twenty years.

For those not familiar, Vanity Fair is essentially the tale of two women. On the one hand, you have Rebecca (Becky) Sharp. Her father a penniless artist and her mother a French dancer, Becky has to make her way through life with no advantages. She has to scrape and scheme for everything that she’s got. Contrast that to Amelia (Emmy) Sedley. The daughter of a seemingly successful businessman, she lives a life of upper middle class luxury. She blithely makes her way through life as every door is opened to her. That is, at least, until her father’s business fails and they are reduced to poverty.

The two meet at a boarding school. Becky is treated there as a charity case while Emmy is held in the highest regard. The two become friends. That is, as much as the ever conniving Becky can have a friend.

At this point in the novel, set in the year or two before the battle of Waterloo, marriage is on the minds of the young women. It’s been long assumed by all that Emmy will marry her childhood friend, George. George is kind of a decent sort but has a wandering eye, is somewhat feckless, and seems to be in no hurry to marry Emmy. When Emmy’s father’s business fails, George’s father, aiming for a higher marriage for George, forbids George to marry Emmy. It is George’s best friend, William Dobbin, who is not so secretly in love with Emmy, that selflessly encourages George to do the right thing by Emmy and marry her. When he does, George’s father disavows and disinherits him.

With help from Emmy, Becky tries to ensnare Emmy’s awkward but successful brother Jos. She nearly succeeds but Jos humiliates himself and runs back to India. Later Becky marries Rawdon Crawley, the scion of a wealthy family. Due to Becky’s low birth, Rawdon is cast out of the family and they have to scrape by anyway that they can.

George dies at Waterloo, leaving Emmy a bereft widow. Both Becky and Emmy now have infant boys. Emmy dotes on hers in memory of her beloved husband while Becky barely acknowledges her child.

The novel continues on for some twenty years. It charts the dramatic ups and downs of Becky’s fortunes as various plans come to fruition or to ruin. At the same time, it describes the downward spiral of Emmy as her father’s continuing failures in business drags the family deeper into poverty. The nadir is when Emmy must give up her boy Georgy so that he can have the advantages that she wishes him to have and to keep her family from becoming completely ruined.

Where will Becky end up? Will Emmy ever recognize, acknowledge, and return the deep love that Williams feels for her? These are the burning questions that Vanity Fair will answer.

The series is quite faithful to the novel. When first published, the novel Vanity Fair was itself serialized in twenty parts, so having an eight part television series makes sense.

The subtitle to Vanity Fair when it was first published as a novel was, “A Novel Without A Hero”. This is a completely true subtitle. There’s not a conventional heroic figure to be found. Becky Sharp, undoubtedly the most interesting character, is completely without scruple with not even a single maternal bone in her body. She thinks nothing of ruining simple honest tradesmen who make the mistake of giving her their products on credit. She runs out on landlords. She barely tolerates Rawdon. She wants to claw her way to the top of the social hierarchy and will stop at nothing to do so. At the end of the novel, she does end up with Jos but (spoiler alert for a 150 year novel) she in all likelihood poisons him for a one thousand pound inheritance.

The other protagonist is Emmy. She is a weak, boring, milquetoast figure that lets the world trample all over her. She really is rather insufferable.

Their respective husbands are scarcely better. George has no problem walking all over the ever compliant Emmy. Having been seduced by Becky so that he will lose all of his money gambling to Rawdon, on the eve of the Waterloo battle George leaves a note to Becky asking her to run away with him. As for Rawdon, he is a very handsome but not very bright soldier that is bewildered by Becky’s machinations.

Let’s not stop at these characters. Jos is a pompous ass. George’s father values nothing that doesn’t have a price tag. Emmy’s parents think nothing of dragging Emmy down into their desperate pit of poverty. Nearly all major and minor characters are caricatures of striving ambition, selfish or foolish wealth, overweening pride, or naïve ignorance.

Probably the most positive character is William Dobbin. Even here, Thackeray paints him basically as a dullard. His love for Emmy is essentially the only thing that he has in his mind. His actions as a consequence have nobility, but as a person he remains uninteresting.

This is not a criticism. I’m sure that that is what Thackeray intended. Indeed it is a novel without heroes. In fact, the whole heroic narrative is exactly what Thackeray was lampooning. There is no knight on a white shining horse. These are all deeply flawed characters that, by nature of being deeply flawed, renders them human.

In my opinion, Thackeray takes this to an extreme. He takes his caustic pen to everything that he sees. No matter what country or what society (low or high) that his story lands in, the people are all exposed to his harsh bright light. No one gets off easy. Thackeray is relentless in showing that everyone is a fool and/or a knave.

This mercilessness in the novel is why, surprisingly enough, I actually preferred the series. Beautifully filmed and wonderfully acted, it smoothed, if ever so slightly, the caustic edges of Thackeray’s characters enough to lift them above mere caricatures. In particular, Olivia Cooke as Becky Sharp and Johnny Flynn as William Dobbin brought their characters to life. Flynn was also wonderful as Knightley in the 2020 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. Perhaps his type is stolid nonromantic leading men in 19th century English novel film adaptations.

So, yes, in a shocking upset, if you’ve never read Vanity Fair and are interested, I’d actually recommend watching the television series.

The Deconstruction Of Film Via Vampires

Title: Irma Vep

This is a saga that spans over 100 years.

Way back in 1915, Louis Feuillade wrote and directed a silent film. It was called Les Vampires. No, it was not a film about Dracula. The Vampires are a criminal gang led by a man known as the Grand Vampire. Irma Vep (an anagram for Vampire) is a night club performer, member of The Vampires, and a general femme fatale. Irma Vep spends much of her time in a tight fitting black suit that is the inspiration for every cat woman suit ever made. Phillipe is a journalist working to expose The Vampires. Moreno is a hypnotist that is after The Vampires money and falls in love with Irma Vep. The film is the battle between Moreno and The Vampires and Phillipe’s attempts to bring them all to justice.

Here’s the thing. Feuillade apparently couldn’t tell this story in the time normally allotted to a conventional motion picture. In fact, the film is nearly 400 minutes long. Realizing that people probably wouldn’t sit through a 6 1/2 hour film in one sitting, he broke it up into 10 parts of varying lengths. In all honesty, I did not actually watch all 400 minutes. In the year 2022, that’s a pretty big ask to watch that long of a silent film. I watched approximately a quarter of it. It allowed me get a good feel for the film.

Despite this being during World War I and despite some episodes being banned for violence and immorality, it became a huge hit in France. Years later, it has attained a high spot in critical regard, considered the forerunner of the crime drama genre and developing techniques that were later used by such directors as Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock.

Fast forward to 1996. A French director named Oliver Assayas writes and directs the film Irma Vep. It won’t be clear from the plot description, but the film is a comedy poking fun at French cinema.

In this film, a director named Rene Vidal is remaking Les Vampires. Controversially, Vidal has hired an Asian actor, Maggie Cheung, to play Irma Vep. The film Irma Vep is about the making of this film.

Rene Vidal is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud. Maggie Cheung plays, um, a Hong Kong actress named Maggie Cheung. Maggie, whenever she puts on the Irma Vep suit, appears to take on the spirit of the silent film Irma Vep. She creeps around at night in hallways and roof tops. She sneaks into rooms and steals jewelry.

After a day of filming, Vidal considers the result horrible and storms off. He has a nervous breakdown. He’s replaced by another French director, who immediately decides that he wants to fire Maggie and hire a French actor. Zoe, a costume designer, makes a pass at Maggie and is refused. Maggie leaves the set to meet Ridley Scott to talk about working on a big budget film. Eventually Vidal’s version of the film is found and shown. It’s a completely nonlinear hallucinatory film with scratches and splices. At the conclusion, it’s not clear if this is the film that will be released or will be replaced with whatever the new director comes up with.

OK, back in the real world. Oliver Assayas and Maggie Cheung fell in love and got married. Maggie moved to France and became a successful actor in European films. They later got divorced and Maggie retired from acting. She’s been little seen since.

In 2020, nearly twenty-five years after he completed Irma Vep, apparently Assayas decided that he wasn’t finished with Irma Vep. Somehow he sold HBO on an eight part series called Irma Vep that he would write and direct. I can barely imagine the pitch meeting: “You see, I’m a French director obsessed with a 400 minute silent film that made a French language comedy based upon it 25 years ago and now I want you to give me a ton of money so that I can make a series in English that expands that universe even further.”

Whatever. However it happened, I’m glad that it did. If the Irma Vep film wasn’t meta enough, this takes it into a whole different level. The director starring in this series is still Rene Vidal. In this universe, the film Irma Vep was made. The actor playing Vidal is Vincent Macaigne. Interestingly enough, he seems to be about the same age as the Vidal actor in the 1996 film. Such anomalies are embraced in this series. This Vidal is at times gentle, sweet, and almost cringing while at other times is almost homicidal in his rage.

The actress playing Irma Vep is named Mira Harberg (played by Alicia Vikander). Mira is trying to make a pivot and start acting in more serious productions. She sees this series as that springboard.

Since the series is so much longer than the film, much more detail is added to the series. The actors for Phillipe and Moreno are much richer in detail. The actor playing Phillipe is a prima donna full of self doubt. The actor playing Moreno pretty much steals the show. He’s a German actor that is a force larger than life. He can only act when he’s on crack cocaine, forcing members of the crew to find crack dealers. At one point, he autoerotic asphyxiates himself into unconsciousness. Expected to remain in a coma, he comes to, escapes from the hospital, and shows up on set eager to act.

If all of this isn’t complex enough, there’s a whole different thread running through the series about Feuillade and the making of the original Les Vampires. The same actors play roles in this thread. For example, the actor playing Vidal is also playing Feuillade. The same actor plays Irma Dep in both films.

It’s actually even more complex than that. In the series they sometimes show the original scenes from Les Vampires and sometimes show the same scenes but played by the actors in the series.

So, for example, Alicia Vikander plays an actress named Mira Harberg, she plays Mira Harberg acting as Irma Vep, she plays Musidora, the original actor that played Irma Vep in 1915, and she plays Musidora playing Irma Vep.

Got that? Keeping all of that straight must have been an unimaginable difficult acting task.

There’s all kinds of callbacks to the Irma Vep film in the series. Vidal has a breakdown and leaves the film (although he does come back to finish). Zoe again makes a pass at the Irma Vep actor but is again rebuffed. At the completion of the film, much like Maggie, Mira leaves for a much larger, much more high profile film role. When Mira puts on the costume, she also seems to be taken over by the spirit of Irma Vep. She sneaks around and steals jewelry. In the costume, she seems to have the ability to move through solid walls. Vidal has an Asian ex-wife named Jade. In this world, Jade was the star of the Irma Vep film. Serving as a proxy for Maggie Cheung, she appears here in the form of a guiding spirit for Vidal.

As with the film, much of the humor of the series derives from the basic absurdity of the film making business.

How do these all compare? Les Vampires is interesting from a historical point of view. The film Irma Vep is a great look at 1990s independent French film making. And the series does a great job lampooning the state of the industry now. It was a pretty serious time commitment but I found all three to be interesting and entertaining.

I can hardly wait to see how Assayas  will approach Irma Vep in the year 2050.